[ Printed Articles ] [ Television Interviews ] [ Internet Chats ] [ Bits & Pieces ] [ Personal Appearances ] [ Miscellaneous ]
	Printed Articles & Interviews Cinescape October 1995

In UPN's Nowhere Man, a politically charged photo disappears -- and the man who snapped it gets framed by a conspiracy that makes him a Stranger in an Estranged Land by Frieda Noone

Some might argue whether or not a picture is worth a thousand words. But in the case of Touchstone television's Nowhere Man, debuting this fall on UPN, it's worth at least a 13-episode order. The premise of the new, hour-long mystery series pivots on some potentially incendiary truths exposed on a piece of film -- specifically, a photo taken by documentary photographer Thomas Veil (Bruce Greenwood) that depicts an execution in a Third world country. Shortly after the shot disappears, Veil's life virtually vanishes as well: It seems as though some clandestine and powerful entity has everyone he knows cooperating in a master plan to wipe out every trace of his life. His wife acts as if he's a stranger, and another man is posing as her husband. His keys no longer fit the locks on his home and his photo gallery. Veil's only option is to begin a dangerous quest to uncover the reason for this torturous conspiracy. But the once-stable man begins to question his sanity, and -- appearing deluded and paranoid -- he is forced into a psychiatric hospital. After learning that even the doctors are in on the scheme to erase his identity, he escapes and sets out on a cross-country course -- searching for answers while eluding his unknown enemy. Like his character, Bruce Greenwood himself can't quite fathom Veil's situation (which, thriller fans will note is cut from the same paranoia-inducing cloth that enmeshed Sandra Bullock in last summer's The Net). "I suppose, like the audience supposes, that it has something to do with the photograph he took -- or maybe something he saw just beyond the frame," says the affable actor, best known for playing the manipulative Dr.. Seth Griffin on the medical drama St. Elsewhere. "But I don't know exactly what it is he's done. It makes Veil a really interesting role because I honestly don't know why the hell they're doing this to him. It plays into the trust issues that we all have: whom can you trust? Can you reach out to somebody when you're in desperate need of human contact? If your trust and your believe in humankind have been abused by somebody mercilessly, it's hard to reach out because you can't set yourself up to be abused again.

"Anyway," Greenwood adds, chuckling, "it plays into the issues of trust that I -- having lived in L.A. for 10 years -- have a lot of!"

With Veil's predicament established, Nowhere Man will avoid turning into an ever-intensifying, Twin Peaks-type who-dunit. and stick to open-and-shut episodes. "We're not going to be trying to get you deeper and deeper into the mystery of what has happened to this man every week," says executive producer Lawrence Hertzog (Stingray, several Hart to Hart telemovies), who penned the pilot. "Your head would be so full of clues that you'd run the risk that Twin Peaks ran: People would say, 'This is just becoming tricks. We can't keep track of it.'"

To avoid that trap, explains Hertzog, all of Veil's relationships -- at least as he knows them -- will be terminated by the first show's conclusion. (In fact, the only elements besides Veil that survive the pilot intact are his missing photo, titled "Hidden Agenda," and its negative -- the sole evidence of his former existence.) "He has no friends after the pilot; it's not a process of attrition. He alone must work out this crisis. That's not to say that he won't meet friendly people en route. But, this being episodic television, I'm not sure that the people who are friendly to him are going to to be healthy at the end of the episode."

Hertzog emphasizes that Nowhere Man is "more than an exciting hour of detective action" -- it's also a show with thematic substance. Veil is less an everyman than a person who overcomes blind conformity to see the truth. "He's been singled out for reasons of honor, integrity and a point of view that is considered a threat, for something that he knows or has seen. In the broader view, this is about the system and how it demands that we fit in -- that we be round pegs that fit into round holes. Tom is currently, I suppose to the people responsible for his situation, a square peg. and they have their wooden mallet , hammering away at him with a lot of energy. So it becomes about how much he can resist." thought the series focuses on veil, it will become evident during its course that there are other "nowhere People."

<

A tremendous fan of The Twilight Zone, Hertzog mentions as inspirations that TV series and another -- the late-60s mystery-adventure, The Prisoner, which concerned a government agent who resists brainwashing after being detained in a surreal community by his enigmatic abductors. Yet in spite of the bizarre plot turn that sets Veil's saga in motion, the executive producer wants to keep things grounded. "there are certain surreal qualities to the pilot and there will be surreal episodes. but hopefully there will be a feeling that this just possibly could happen. I would like to keep that alive, even if the show starts to get pretty close to the incredible. We'll fall into a hole if you suddenly stop identifying with Tom and start thinking, 'This is so weird I don't believe it anymore.'"

Greenwood agrees that keeping closer to the mundane can give the series a stronger scarier edge. "Take, for instance, meeting somebody on a street in a small town in which you've never been, somebody who you knew when you were a kid. In the context of Tom's experience that becomes absolutely terrifying. For anybody else it would be, 'Oh, how are you? Where have you been? But in Veil's mind, the questions are closer to, 'How did they get here? Why are they here? How are they going to undo me?' Even the most seemingly innocuous incidents can have sinister implications."

The pilot's helmer, Tobe Hooper -- a veteran genre director known for his intense visual style (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist) -- also favors a low-key approach to the material. "Relative to the times that The Prisoner was produced, today -- by those standards -- we live in the surreal," he notes. "What I tried to create in the first episode was a surreal world, but yet one that wouldn't separate the audience from the dramatic piece. In other words, something that wouldn't wave flags and say, 'Look at me! Look at my filmmaking ability!' -- but concentrate on these characters." Hooper is heartened by what he sees as a trend toward feature film-level quality in TV, thanks to programs like The X-Files and N.Y. P. D. Bue. "Television offers certain freedoms now that feature directors are attracted to. And those include that we can be involved with material that has a bit more substance. We don't have to do as much flash and explosion."

That Nowhere Man won't be attempting to push the mayhem envelope is probably just as well, considering the current pollitical climate. While acknowledging that there's generally more leeway in network television's Standards and Practices divisions today, Hooper, who directed the rather shockingly violent (for its time) 1979 miniseries Salem's Lot, doubts the series will be subject to the kind of censorial stride Americna Gothic has encountered at CBS. "The networks and production studios have certainly become more responsible about these things," he says. Nowhere Man is a thriller, and we're handling [that issue] quite well."

Hertzog, meanwhile, lauds fledgling UPN for taking a chance on such an ususual project. "I don't think any other network would have given me carte blanche to do this," he says, recalling with astonishment his initial pitch meeting. "They looked at me and said, ' If you could do anything you absolutely ever wanted to do, but you never had the courage to pitch it because you felt you'd be tossed from the office, what would you do? My initial reaction was one of shock because after more than 15 years in this business I didn't have an answer.

"I called a few other friends of mine who are writers and said, 'You're not going to beleive it --I've just had the meeting we have all dreamed about. Somebody really cares enough to let us take a chance. I guess I felt a little bit like Tom Veil in that situation. I didn't really believe it!"

But there was a somewhat intimidating side to it as well, Hertzog admits. "After my initial enthusiasm over getting my big shot, I realized I would have to put my money where my mouth was. I thought Boy, I'm going to have to crawl back home and do Hart to Hart again for another few years if this doesn't work....."

Although the 90-minute pilot was completed quickly in Los Angeles (it had to be prepped and shot in just 18 days), Hertzog and company chose to base the balance of the production in Portland, Ore., "to give the show a look that could be anywhere....a feel that we are in places we've been, places we've seen. Los Angeles has such a defined and specific look with the palm trees, etc., while Portland enables us to get to mountains, suburbs and small, nowhere towns [for use as backdrops] quickly. All we have to do is turn around to get a different look, which is helpful in conveying some of the distances Veil travels on a per-episode basis." (The Pacific Northwest also is familiar territory to the Canadian-born Greenwood, who attended the University of British Cojumbia after being raised in Washington, D.C., Princeton, N.J. and Vancouver.)

Even if the show turns out less than perfect, Hertzog feels that being granted the opportunity to do it bodes well for TV at large. "I believe UPN is sincere in trying this show," he says. "If it works, it will have proven a point: That we'll get better television, or at least more interesting television, if someone at the network level gives the creative community a chance to work like that."